


In Starlit Nights

by bigmoneygator



Series: Under Blue Moon [3]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Cecil is Inhuman, Fluff, Gen, M/M, One Shot, POV Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale), POV Cecil (Welcome to Night Vale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-07
Updated: 2013-08-07
Packaged: 2017-12-22 17:50:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/916233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigmoneygator/pseuds/bigmoneygator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s occurred to Carlos that Cecil probably isn’t human. When he comes to visit the lab, the Geiger counters go off howling all at once, even if they weren’t turned on. The seismometers simply stop; they cease their readouts with a tiny putt noise. In Cecil’s presence, the soil bacteria in the petri cultures that Carlos keeps on one of the shelves double their rate of mitosis. Every piece of delicate machinery he touches emits a shrieking noise and sends sparks shooting into the air. Stray cats yowl outside the windows, trying to get his attention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Starlit Nights

**Author's Note:**

> I am a lying liar face and I wrote a third companion piece. This will probably be the last one though because I really have actual stuff to do. Thanks for all the reads and comments and I really appreciate all of you. This probably isn't as great as the other ones but hey. A Roman numeral denotes Cecil's POV, while an Arabic one indicates Carlos'.
> 
> [now with a mix](http://8tracks.com/isladelmar/under-blue-moon).

**1**

The first time Cecil and Carlos make love, it is all at once the most amazing and the most strange experience Carlos has ever had. Once, in college, he had taken peyote and wandered the woods with his friends. The colors and sounds, all the visions and thoughts from that night, were only half as bizarre and wonderful as Cecil.

Carlos had never bought into the nonsense teenagers whispered about seeing stars when they kissed. He had never even considered the maudlin, overly dramatic descriptions of sex, with sparks flying and fingers burning. Sex was putting two people together, as simple as a mathematical equation. It was a comfort, sometimes, but mostly it was messy. It was tangled emotions and sloppy, saliva-filled kisses and body fluids being swapped.

Carlos swears his hair is scorched for weeks afterwards, that the mere remembrance of the event will set the cuffs of his labcoat to smoking. He will put his hand on Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History Of Time” and swear that when Cecil kissed him that night, stars were the least of it. He saw entire galaxies, bright purple nebulas, pulsars glowing blue, supernovas imploding into black holes. It felt like fireworks going off in his bones, cracking and healing and splintering over and over again. Like every cell in his body was bursting, cytoplasm exploding hot and amethyst colored on the backs of his eyelids.

The humming that accompanies Cecil, that sticks around when Carlos is alone, seems to make the bed shift. Maybe it makes the whole building shift, or perhaps just levitate above its foundations. Carlos is lost in this moment, lost in the lightning crackling in his skin. The only thing that keeps him grounded is Cecil’s voice, whispering his name.

The first time Cecil and Carlos make love, Night Vale gets its first earthquake.

Its first _real_ earthquake.

**i**

Cecil loves Carlos so much that there are no words. Sometimes he feel like he’s floating a few feet off the ground, and sometimes he actually _is_ floating a few feet off the ground, but he doesn’t notice until he hits his head on a doorframe.

**2**

Cecil makes extremely good pancakes. They eat them in bed, a concession of Carlos’ that he hopes he doesn’t regret in the form of ants in his bed. He has to draw a line somewhere, though. Cecil can make his own pancakes with shredded coconut and chocolate chips and drown them in butter-flavored Aunt Jemima’s, but Carlos can’t eat all that sugar. Cecil puts blueberries in half the batch, and cooks them so they’re still a little raw in the center, the way Carlos likes.

Cecil always ends up sticky with syrup. Carlos thinks that it’s worth having to wash the sheets every time he stays over, just to taste the sugar on his fingers, on his lips.

**3**

Carlos didn’t know what to make of it. Half of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex had collapsed. There had been another massive spike in the seismometer readings last night, but nothing had ever happened from those kinds of readings. Not before, anyway. Teddy Williams assured Carlos that he had insurance, and it covered Acts of God, Goddesses, angry spirits, and unforeseen invasion from time travelling monkeys. An earthquake was small potatoes, compared to some of the other claims he had put in over the years.

Cecil mourns the loss of the best buffalo wings in Night Vale. They serve them at the Moonlight All-Night Diner as well, but he insists that they aren’t the same. Carlos, whose palette is not so refined when it comes to spicy foods, can’t seem to detect a difference. They just taste like cayenne pepper and Tabasco sauce and butter. Like every other buffalo wing he’s ever tasted. 

“You don’t understand,” Cecil sighs. “You just don’t understand.”

 

****

**ii**

Cecil feels so guilty about the earthquake that he can’t shake the feeling that everyone who sees him knows it was his fault. It was completely and utterly his fault, and he even shies away from Old Woman Josie, convinced that she and her terrifying angels are judging him. He’s so paranoid about the Sheriff and his Secret Police that he obeys the semaphore flags to a tee, eats at Big Rico’s twice a week, and locks his doors and windows at night.

He’s taken to curling up in a very small ball on the couch under a hand-knitted blanket his grandmother may or may not have made for him one Christmas. He thinks that if he makes himself small enough, no one will know that his unabashed need, his greedy, grabby, covetous desire, was the source of the quake that ruined the bowling alley. Carlos is utterly baffled by Cecil’s strange new behavior, and says as much.

“You know,” Carlos murmurs, digging under the blanket to pull Cecil’s glasses off before he breaks them again, “if I wanted a cat, I would have adopted one.”

Cecil doesn’t have anything to say. His passion for this lovely scientist is suddenly gut-wrenchingly terrifying.

“I’m very concerned about you,” Carlos says, pulling Cecil into his lap, blanket and all. “You’ve gone all colorless.” Cecil hasn’t looked in a mirror lately, but he wouldn’t be surprised if he has become completely transparent.

After laying in Carlos’ lap for the duration of two and a half episodes of Judge Judy, Cecil finally says, “I feel like a lizard.” It didn’t make sense, even to him, but it felt like the appropriate thing to say.

“Oh?”

“Or perhaps,” Cecil says quietly, “a lizard in a convincing human suit.”

“I don’t think you’re a lizard. Or a lizard in a convincing human suit.”

Cecil pulls the blanket off his head and stares up at Carlos. “I am incredibly sorry about the earthquake.”

“Cecil, the earthquake wasn’t your fault,” Carlos says, smoothing the hair at Cecil’s temples with his gentle, calloused fingers. 

“It was,” Cecil insists.

"It was not."

Cecil grabs Carlos' hand and put it to his chest. He looks up, eyes baleful and luminous. "Yes," he says. "It was."

Carlos' breath catches. It seems, finally, he understands.

**4**

After Cecil leaves Carlos’ apartment, after the humming dies down, there is a sad sort of stillness in the air. Carlos tries to fill it with music, playing early Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. It’s a poor substitute, but it’s better than nothing. Carlos misses Cecil when he’s gone. It seems very simple, though of course it isn’t. Not really. Carlos likes science because it’s easier to figure out than the complexities of people, the ins and outs of human relationships, the twists and turns they take. On one hand, it’s a simple chemical response. On the other, there isn’t anything simple, chemical or easily understandable about it.  


Cecil and Carlos are both early risers, and once breakfast is done and Cecil has gone off to the station, Carlos tosses the sheets in the creaky old washer located in the small room off the kitchen. He greedily buries his nose in them before as he carries them from the pullout couch, smelling Cecil’s spun sugar smell and maple syrup from their breakfast. He can’t help himself.

It’s occurred to Carlos that Cecil probably isn’t human. When he comes to visit the lab, the Geiger counters go off howling all at once, even if they weren’t turned on. The seismometers simply stop; they cease their readouts with a tiny putt noise. In Cecil’s presence, the soil bacteria in the petri cultures that Carlos keeps on one of the shelves double their rate of mitosis. Every piece of delicate machinery he touches emits a shrieking noise and sends sparks shooting into the air. Stray cats yowl outside the windows, trying to get his attention. 

Whatever Cecil _is_ , or whatever he is not, Carlos is convinced that he is special. He is one of a kind. Ethereal and lovely Cecil.

**iii**

Cecil is completely amazed that Carlos wants to continue seeing him after he caused a natural disaster. What other sorts of terrible things being in love could make Cecil accidentally do remains to be seen, and he does not necessarily want to see it.

“What if it’s another earthquake?” Cecil asks, tugging on Carlos’ hand. “What if we collapse half the town?”

“What if we end up collapsing the vast underground civilization of the people that live under Lane Five?” Carlos asks. Cecil can never tell if he’s teasing or not. Sarcasm isn’t something that people in Night Vale are very fluent in. Carlos usually tries to keep the sass to a minimum, for Cecil’s sake.

“But what if,” Cecil insists. 

“Self denial is no way to live,” Carlos insists. “You’re the one who hounded me on the radio for months, need I remind you. You can’t give me something so great and then snatch it away like this.”

Cecil is so in love with Carlos that he makes tectonic plates shift. It is mighty impressive, if a little inconvenient. He does not want to lose this wonderful man with his perfect hair and smell of lavender chewing gum. Cecil squeezes Carlos’ hand so tight his fingers go pale from loss of circulation.

**iv**

The second time they make love, Cecil is so very, very careful. They’re in the doublewide, as opposed to Carlos’ apartment. Cecil is convinced that the herculean effort of contorting himself to fit together with Carlos in the tiny berth will curb the destruction somewhat. He focuses on the shape that Carlos’ lips make when they form his name. He focuses on the feeling of the explosions of chemicals in Carlos’ brain spilling over and dripping down into his own consciousness, tries to go inside the tiny galaxies flaring to life and exploding into nothingness in Carlos’ thoughts.

Cecil does not fall in love easily. Steve Carlsburg followed him around for months with dollar-store chocolates and wilted bouquets of hideous cabbage roses and horrendous poems about Cecil’s scarlet hair before he agreed to go out on a date. Cecil didn’t even know he had scarlet hair around Steve. Actually, he tried very hard to make his hair into snakes around Steve, but trans-species mutation was never a talent of his. But Steve Carlsburg was like a child: he wanted what he wanted until he got it. 

That was when Cecil discovered that he did not deal with heartbreak very well. Steve Carlsburg’s house still gets the occasional infestation of radioactive packrats and leaks in the space-time continuum through which interstellar mites crawl out by the thousands. 

He had half hoped that Carlos would never, ever return his affections. Cecil cared so deeply about his scientist that he never wanted to accidentally set a plague of really ugly spiders loose in his car’s radiator. He didn’t want anything bad to happen, not to the town, not to their relationship, and certainly not to Carlos himself. 

The second time they make love, Cecil does not destroy the town.

Afterwards, Carlos looks out the window and laughs. Cecil follows his gaze and is shocked into silence.

It has started snowing in Night Vale.

**5**

Cecil is back to being bright and freckled. For a second there, Carlos was worried. Cecil looked all grey and drab, like he was made out of clay. Carlos once dated a guy who grew up on his Polish grandmother’s terrifying stories of golems, and that guy in turn terrified Carlos with them. For a few days, he was scared that Cecil was turning into one, or that he had been one the entire time.

The snow brightened Cecil’s mood considerably. Carlos had never seen anyone pull on pants and a sweater so fast before in his life. Cecil was out in his small parcel of a backyard, staring at the sky in awe, before Carlos could even locate his glasses. 

“I’ve never seen snow before,” Cecil had explained once Carlos came outside, holding his hand out to catch the snowflakes. “Well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen snow before.”

“I’ve seen plenty,” Carlos said. 

“This is . . .” Cecil let the snow fall through his fingers. 

“Magic?”

“Don’t be silly, Carlos,” Cecil had scoffed.

Still, for days afterward, Cecil’s eyes are the slate grey color of the storm clouds. His wonderful freckles are stark against his pale skin. The snow melted fast in the desert, and it’s as if Cecil is trying to hold onto that tiny little piece of a miracle. The night they accidentally made it snow in the middle of a desert.


End file.
